The Failed Commodification of Technical Work

Post by underlipton » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

rswail wrote: post #38

Programming is still a craft, not engineering, or manufacturing. A software house should work like bespoke tailoring, or fine cabinetry, or glass blowing. There's still no better training for programming than the equivalent of master/journeyman/apprentice. Apologies for the gender specific terms, but they are specific to how tradespeople operated from medieval times. The worst thing to ever happen to the practice of…

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 3:47 PM UTC

danwee wrote: post #6

edent wrote: post #3

I think - and it's only a think - that the author has ignored that a large part of what used to be called technical work is now commodified. I remember when a mail merge literally meant printing out lots of address labels and then manually sticking them onto a letter & envelope. Word 2.0 (?) solved that problem for the 1990s and MailChimp has commodified it for the 21st century. Double-entry book-keeping was technica…

What you say is true, but the amount of "grunt work" is not constant over the years. In fact, I think the amount of "grunt work" in teh tech industry is just growing and not shrinking; I think the following look is quite obvious: - amount of current grunt work: X - new tech Z appears that makes X be reduced to 0.1X - at the same time Z enables new ways of doing things. Some things become grunt work because they are a…

Post by gustavus » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

simonbarker87 wrote: post #18

I agree that the full commodification of technical work is a bad idea and will, hopefully, continue to fail. However, having read the Phoenix Project twice and hating most of Scrum, I disagree that’s what the Phoenix Project is advocating for. My main takeaways from the PP are: 1. Have clear systems in place to carry out and manage your repeatable work, automate where possible 2. Minimise the time work is in progress…

Post by whstl » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

simonbarker87 wrote: post #51

Pet_Ant wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hating most of Scrum I'll just say that if you look at Scrum itself there is really nothing objectionable to it. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html It's the other shit people pack on top of calling it Scrum that usually sucks ass. I've found the best way to fight back against shitty-Scrum is not to fight it, but actually feign puritanical allegiance to the actual doctrine, it's much less repulsive. I makes yo…

Very true, after being told many times “that’s not what it says in the Scrum guide, we need to do it like …” by a Scrum Master and a PO I decided to read it. I was astounded to find that the guide says very little and they were just using it as a weapon to push their own controlling desires on to the team. All the devs read it and the next time they used that line we asked them what it actually does say, they just ma…

Post by happymellon » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

eterm wrote: post #59

smoe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do like the planning poker for the same reason. I just find that people use story points overly granular. E.g. when using Fibonacci series, what is the point spending time discussing the minute difference between 1,2 and 3 points. What I have liked in the past, is just using small, medium, large or unactionable. Or with the right team/managment, not using estimates at all, just have people pick up the tasks they fe…

There's more difference between 2 points and 3 points than between 5 points and 8. If you're looking to fill an arbitrary bucket, relative size matters most.